Smuggler Bill needs a Mill
“Smuggler Bill
Dashes round by the mill
That stands near the road upon Monkton Hill”
My searches of the internet for information about Monkton Hill, seemed to suggest that such a place exists in Chippenham, Wiltshire, but I could find no trace of it in Kent, except in references to the Smuggler’s Leap story in the Ingoldsby legends. We know that Smuggler Bill passed over Sarre Bridge and that Sarre is not far from Monkton and that that Sarre has a windmill on the Monkton road. I decided to make something based on that.
First I must thank the people who uploaded pictures of Sarre Mill to the internet and hope they won’t mind that I have included resized copies of their images in this Sarre Mill montage below.
Clearly building a windmill was going to be complicated and I thought about buying one from the iClone market place. None really seemed to resemble the mill pictured above.
I then looked at the Trimble (formerly Google) 3D Warehouse. Really I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, because from the photos I can’t really tell if the mill at Sarre has six or eight sides. I decided that 8 seems more likely. However I couldn’t find any eight sided mills on Trimble.
It seemed that building the sails and the fantail would be very complicated, so I decided to try to scavenge those bits from other models.
I really have to congratulate someone named Jonathan Green for this fabulous model. I downloaded it and set about preserving the bits I wanted to use in iClone. Basically I deselected all the elements I didn’t want using 3DXchange and exported what was left as an iProp.
In my first attempt I kept the doors and windows, but quickly discovered I could not move them independently of everything else once in iClone. Since the pitches of the sides of my mill body were different to those in the original model, I ended up with doors and windows floating in space. I tried again, this time with those items removed. I also independently saved one door and one window as separate iProps.
The Mill and its hill were made by resizing / re-proportioning basic iClone 3D building blocks. The flat topped round cone at the bottom, became the hill. The 8 sided column above it became the stone built body of the lower mill. I noticed from the photos that this does not taper in the Sarre mill which made it different to the original Trimble model. The eight sided flat topped cone at the top became the timber clad part of the upper mill.
The pictures of Sarre mill seem to show a door in the upper part of the mill. As it stands anyone exiting though that door, would have a long fall, so I assume there was originally a gallery (as per the Trimble model).
The wooden planking texture was made using a flat image and B2M (covered in an earlier post on this blog). On this occasion when I tried to apply my newly made material, I could see distinct seams where I didn’t want them. Previously when I wanted to overcome this issue, I created my own seem-less images, by taking 4 copies of the image and then joining them together, having flipped 3 of the images, horizontally, vertically or both.
On this occasion I used the MakeItTile feature within B2M to do that for me. I used the splat option and it worked perfectly.
Click on the image above to ENLARGE
Having built my mill I placed it in my scene inside the apex of one of the bends on my pre-defined path.
In my model there are still several differences from the one at Sarre. An all black mill might not show up too well when filmed on a dark night, so I decided to keep the stone colour on the surface of the lower mill. Painting the wooden upper with pitch would make perfect sense, but I am not sure the stone would have needed it. The lower mill in my model is taller than the one at Sarre and so the door is not as high. I have also added fewer windows.
I was thinking about correcting some of these defects, when I discovered that the current mill at Sarre was built in 1820, which is somewhat later than when our story is set. Given that I don’t know where Monkton Hill is, and have no idea of what Smuggler Bill’s mill looked like, I decided to leave it as is.
Tony